St. Teresa of Avila, the great Catholic mystic and Doctor of the Church, spoke of an Interior Castle, an interior place of prayer and meditation where we could progress on a spiritual journey to find God. Each courtyard in the castle has its spiritual exercises where we grow in humility, discipline, and surrender and prepare ourselves for an encounter with God in His inner throne room.
I found this castle. For me, it was more of a Mayan ruin, buried under the brush to the point that I didn’t even know it was there—until one day, in an act of great grace and reliant solely on His mercy, I tripped and fell through the overgrown brush and dropped down into this hidden castle (metaphorically speaking, of course). But by a miracle of grace, it was as if I had dropped directly into the throne room. There, I encountered God as a loving and merciful Father, before whom all of my resistance crumbled. It was the moment of my conversion, and in that moment of encounter, I found such deep healing to the father wound that had always plagued me. I was totally content to be like a child hidden in His arms.
But given that I had dropped into the throne room, I hadn’t progressed through all of those courtyards. I found that the fellow travelers I met there had such different ways about them. They were versed in prayer, fasting, scripture study, charitable acts, etc. (the weapons of their knighthood). Those were all things I had vigorously avoided in my prior life of rebellion against Him. And so, I left my Father’s throne room and started following those travelers through those rooms to try to earn some of those weapons that they used so well so that I could stand before my Father as a man rather than as a weak and vulnerable child. Gradually, I found myself distant from the Father whose love had changed my life so radically. As I tried to earn my credentials as a Christian, my heart started to hide from the Father once again, like Adam and Eve hiding in the garden.
As I explored my father’s castle, it took on such a cold and difficult hue. Concrete floors that were cold to my bare feet. The stone walls had sharp corners that could easily cut. There were traps to keep predators out. Armor and swords adorned the walls, which were too heavy for me to carry and too sharp for me to touch. The whole place was about discipline, order, and cold hard truths. It was not a place for a vulnerable child. And though I was trying to be like the “big boys” and make my own way, more and more I just missed the throne room. I missed the love and mercy that I felt there when I could just sit at my Father’s feet. He would laugh at my little endeavors, rejoice over my successes, and teach me the lessons from my defeats. But somehow I’d gotten lost in the cold, dark castle and couldn’t quite find my way back to Him.
This is when I found the Schoenstatt Movement. It inspired me to ask someone for help. It inspired me to embrace a guide who could lead me through the castle, back to the throne room. Her name is Mary. She is given to us as a mother by Christ. And the Church specifically gives her to us as a mother (Mother of the Church) and invites us to take her hand and let her guide us. And so, recognizing that I’d made a mistake in venturing into the cold, dark corners of the castle alone, I reached out to her. And with her, the castle itself has changed, like our old mentor Sr Marie Day used to say. She put flowers in the windows and carpets on the floor. She had the corners of the walls made more rounded. She guides me away from the scary places and always leads me back to the Father when I get lost. With my mother, the castle is no longer this cold, dark place of rigid discipline. Instead, it’s become a loving home. And while I had found healing for that Father wound in that initial conversion 20 years ago, now, with my mother’s guidance, I’ve found healing for the mother wound that still plagued me. This interior loving home is a place of great healing, a place of inner transformation where we have the freedom to be who we were created to be: a loved child of God.
It’s become a place I can go to in prayer any time I want, to be in the presence of the Mother who watches over me and intercedes for me, and to encounter the Father who leads with mercy and showers me with love. I find such strength in that interior loving home. It gives me the freedom to play like a child, trying new things with so little fear of failure. It gives me a place I can run and hide when the world outside gets too scary and the thunder gets too loud. I can run to them, my mother and my father. They comfort me. They protect me. And they constantly remind me, deep down inside, that I am loved.
Do you come from a broken home? Are you one of the countless souls who grew up in the absence of that ‘loving home’? The greatest gift we can give a child is the love and support of their mother and father: a loving home. And if it is absent, they will spend the rest of their life trying to make up for it.
I am no longer from a broken home. I used to be. My childhood was far more traumatic than most. It was a place of such fear, violence, and hopelessness. And as I went out into the world from that home, it was always from a position of weakness. It was always from a place of self-consciousness. And it was all such a heavy, heavy burden on me.
But now that burden is gone. And anytime the burden starts to come back, I can run back to that interior loving home, the home I am now from, and it disappears again. I still see that burden in so many people’s eyes, even fellow Christians, the fellow travelers in the castle. I want them to come stay at my loving home, to look around and explore it. I want them to know that Mother and that Father. I want them to know that they don’t have to carry the weight of the world upon them. I want them to be rooted in the loving home that I am, the home we find through Christ.
What if we all had these interior loving homes? What if we could find healing for our wounds there? What if we could find relief from our burdens there? We could build them all next to each other in a new interior neighborhood… a new community. Wouldn’t that be a beautiful place?
